Phishing scheme targets United Way

Posted by Francis Lim on March 24th, 2005 at 05:30am

I recently read an interesting article from the NP Advisors about what can happen when the United Way was targeted in a phishing scheme.

A phishing scheme is essentially a type of identity theft. But instead of stealing your name, date of birth, and social insurance number, the thieves want your banking or other financial information. It starts when unsuspecting people are sent emails with links to a web site designed to mirror a legitimate web site. By clicking on these links people are directed to the cloned site where they are prompted to enter their bank account information, or credit card details. This data is then captured with the intent to commit fraud.

The article mentions some important steps charities can take to prevent being targeted in a phishing scheme. For instance, you can start by simply checking out what similar domain names have been registered, and to whom. This includes searching your charity aliases based on the .net, .org, .com and other common derivatives. If these are available, it would be wise to consider registering them to prevent any potential donor confusion. As in the case for the United Way would an unsuspecting donor have known which site was legitimate between the domains the unitedways.org, and national.unitedway.org? Probably not.

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